In today’s world, we’re inundated with information from all sides.
So we don’t want to merely add to all the noise.
Like the space between the lightning and the clap of thunder, we want to make people pause and listen. To create a silence around us that speaks volumes.
We want to create meaning and value. If something we hear lacks meaning, we tend to fill in the gaps with what we know already and just move on. We don’t want our audience to do that.
But all too often, there’s an inner battle between the value we could bring and our ability to communicate it. Because we get in our own way.
Maybe you know the formula: our performance = our potential minus our interference
How do we interfere? We tend to focus on “more”.
The Problem of More
We think that giving more details and using as many words, as sophisticated as possible, will impress. (This probably stems from our school days when more details meant more marks.) Our communication ends up being like an overgrown garden where our listeners get lost in the long grass and weeds.
We need to remember that details are like salt: too much of them and you spoil the taste.
Continue to read here.